My first Career Day experience

I had the opportunity to speak at my daughter’s school last week for Career Day. This was the firs time I had ever done something like this so I was nervous but excited. I have plenty of experience working with children of various ages so I was not nervous about interracting with them at all. I don’t like my voice and when I’m nervous, I get the “Umms” and “Ahs”.

Maya came to “pick me up” and escort me to Ms. Mattsen’s Kindergarten class. I guess it was good to start in familiar territory since I know most of these kids. To them I was Maya’s dad and that was good enough. During the year, the kids have learned about attributes and using them to describe things they see and read about. I thought it would be cool to explain to them the basics of HTML. I used a sign in their classroom which contained sentences in various colors and with some words underlined. I asked them for various attributes of the sentences. These kids know so much more than I did at their age. I had my laptop with me and a page in development. So we wrote several sentences and then the kids assigned several attributes, or HTML tags to change their appearance on a web page. At the end they got to see their web page, which was satisfaction for them.

The most asked question of the day was, “Do you make games?” I began to wish I did program games for a short while. It might have made me seem more cool to the kids. I also spoke to Ms. Meadows Kindergarten class and 2 fifth grade classes that day. Hopefully, I inspired at least one to become a web application developer.